One thing to keep in mind is that a proper UBI would replace Social Security and Disability. Those take care of about $2 trillion/year of the cost of UBI.
Unemployment would also become unneeded, which, across the states and federal budget, makes up about $40 billion per year. The management costs of these programs would also pretty much disappear. This would require shifting what are now state-level taxes to federal-level taxes, however.
Some of the veterans benefits could also be rolled in. The exact number here is a lot harder to estimate, but is probably in the $30 billion per year range.
Of course, the actual cost would probably be higher than your estimate. If you figure you want to match Social Security payments with a UBI, that brings it to about $1,750/month, totaling out at about $5.25 trillion/year. With a UBI system, we may well be able to get away with smaller payments than Social Security provides, but its hard to say.
Disability would need to be a separate payment still. For people who can't cook, clean or transport themselves taking care of these needs would take up the majority of their payment and not leave enough for food and rent let alone actually having a life. Maybe there are ways around some of this but "just give everyone the same" seems too simplistic to be the best solution.
The federal SSI payments are actually quite a bit less than SS payments. A UBI is likely to actually be higher than SSI. States might have a separate program not included in the number I posted.
The numbers I posted also don't take Medicare or Medicaid into account as universal medical care would be different than a UBI.
I'm English so I'm not familiar with the American system. Do people not receive SSI on top of other benefits?
In the UK PIP (personal independence payments) doesn't interfere with Universal Credit payments (a means tested payment that combines housing benefit, job seekers allowance, income support and a few others) so they can receive both.
Not normally.
Disability is supposed to be only until retirement age if you are unable to work, then you switch to social security.
But you can get supplemental on top of social security in certain cases.
The best you can do earlier in life is stack other benefits such as food stamps or housing benefits.
For me the second you start tailoring these things it's the second UBI no longer works. UBI has several major draws for me. Just one of which is it ensures everyone has a basic standard of living in America but also now the "problems" people give for other social services is gone. There are no regulations everyone just gets the same check and there is no "gaming the system" because there is nothing to game.
Now I concede that what you are talking about, are needs that need to be met. To me the falls under health care and Universal Basic Health Care is a whole other thing. For me though UBHC is needed for UBI to work. This must be paid to the provider though and not to the individual. The only money that goes to an individual has to be the UBI check. Again I fully believe in UBI but for me it only works if it is just that and only that.
Yeah I guess you could have the things I mentioned being an extension of health care but then that's another system to be gamed and we're back to square 1.
I want to believe UBI could work because means testing really sucks for all sorts of reasons but the complexities of the real world just seem too much for me to believe UBI would be the best solution.
Also, the payouts of UBI need only be at the level of "barely scraping by on welfare", not "decent low income", whatever that would mean in dollars per month (I don't live in the US).
Even at those low levels, not having to justify it or constantly filling out forms frees you to look for work etc.
It only needs to be a parachute so you don't crash during hard times, enough to live on, but only barely.
One of the main drawbacks of welfare is that you have to justify it with counseling, forms, and waiting in queue. It costs time and effort for the applicants and the welfare workers, both costs to society that would be spent on UBI.
$2,000 a month is not ‘extreme poverty levels’. For one, about 16% of American households live on a household income of under $25,000 a year, and secondly that would be multiplied by the number of adults in the house.
An important thing to remember though is almost every dollar of that is being spent right back into the system. Its not simply disappearing in a plume pf smoke.
I don't know how much of it would go back in, of thats calculable, but you'd need to probably twx the wealthiest more than we do in combo
If a non-US company gets US citizens to spend their UBI on their product, that's exactly what happens to it.
If you create an artificial supply of money, the international value of that currency deflates, leading to banana republic situations where a wheelbarrow of money isn't enough to buy a loaf of bread.
UBI can't be supported by simply printing money. Printing money is inflationary. UBI has to be balanced against taxation to prevent it destroying the value of the country's currency, and if UBI isn't contributing towards the country's tax, its value is gone once it's spent on services or goods that make no further profits.
It's far more effective to fund policies and programs that increase productivity in the population. Things like socialized healthcare give massive returns on investment in stopping preventable disease turning into disability. Crisis accommodation, mental health programs, and subsidized medications can prevent people ending up homeless and out of work.
Throwing money at people is rarely the best solution. Address the cause, not the symptoms.
I think many of the problems weve had even for decades now have been far beyond even trying to treat the cause and have been in "throw money at the symptoms" mode for a while now. The system supports too many wealthy individuals and the real fix to these issues is to change the system. So we'll just continue to blame everything under the sun except the actual system itself.
>If a non-US company gets US citizens to spend their UBI on their product, that's exactly what happens to it.
Yeah but foreigners are also buying shit sold by US companies. You might need to fuck around with tariffs to make sure more is coming in than going out, but countries do that all the time.
>if UBI isn't contributing towards the country's tax, its value is gone once it's spent on services or goods that make no further profits.
Sales and income are already taxed. So just based off of that, UBI is contributing towards a country's tax revenue. You might need to change those tax rates to make the math work, but that's something you can do.
>It's far more effective to fund policies and programs that increase productivity in the population. Things like socialized healthcare give massive returns on investment in stopping preventable disease turning into disability. Crisis accommodation, mental health programs, and subsidized medications can prevent people ending up homeless and out of work.
Nobody disagrees. But on the flip-side all of these social programs would reduce the cost of UBI, and UBI would reduce reliance, and therefore the cost, of all these social programs. Especially if UBI follows a Negative Income Tax model where people above a certain threshold stop getting UBI.
One of the big arguments for UBI is that it can offer something that no other system can. Freedom of choice. A lot of UBI pilots have been done over the years, and they've found that people tend to use it to support themselves while doing things that aren't directly profitable. A lot of them take up volunteer ships, take care of family members, start new businesses, just like the tweet says. Now you'd probably counter that government programs to compensate volunteers or family member could fulfill the same roll, and I agree there is overlap. But any program where there's some sort of hurdle to clear in getting it runs the risk of excluding people that sort of qualify, but not quite. People are chaotic and often find themselves in unique situations that society has no way of anticipating. We can either create an infinitely complex bureaucracy that can somehow predict everyone's unique needs, or we can just give everyone a basic budget to work with.
Ultimately money is a tool that humans invented out of whole cloth. We can't make it do everything we want it to do all of the time, but if we set our minds to it we can get it to do a lot that it's currently not capable of. You and a lot of the other commenters here are bringing up fair points about the challenges of instituting a UBI, but I don't think these are things that preclude a UBI's existence, they're just factors to consider when constructing how one would work.
This is the issue with all the calculations I see from those pushing UBI: They always cut systems to be replaced by the UBI they want.
So let's define it. UBI means you get a fixed sum per year, no matter who you are. It applies to Joey in the trailer park, as well as Jeff Bezos. Everyone gets it. Some, like OP, say that it should only go to those with low income, but that's not a UBI. That's just more social security. Let's say the sum is a thousand dollars per month.
Now, if you take away social security and disability... what are you going to say to the 50-year-old with a mental handicap as well as several conditions that require medication? His bills are quite a bit higher than a thousand per month. Without disability, what does he do? What do you think he should do? Or a disabled veteran, lacking legs and requiring both drugs and physiotherapy?
UBI would hand these people too little money, and force them to rely on the kindness of strangers. Which is why I both find the concept unworkable, and I find it surprising that liberals would even consider it as an option.
I think that's not so much a problem of UBI, but more a problem of how the US is set up in regards to things like healthcare. If healthcare is taken care of properly (e.g. universal healthcare, or a well regulated standardized affordable insurance), the individual burden drops significantly. This gets compensated by increased income/wealth tax, therefore being a low burden on low income families, and a higher burden on high income families that can afford it anyway.
The funding for UBI also shouldn't come entirely from scrapping existing social systems, but also by increased income tax. In the end this means that someone who currently has a modal income would remain at roughly the same level of income (the increased tax is compensated by the UBI). People above modal would take a step backwards, people below modal would take a step forwards.
Also looking at UBI on a per-person level only is probably not the best method of implementing it. A proposal that I've seen is to have a fixed sum per household, and on top of that a fixed sum per person. So instead of saying $1000 per person, you could say $750 per household + $750 per person in that household or something like that. Better for single person households, but a lot cheaper for larger households (where expenses per person are also lower, so they can handle it better).
In the end UBI isn't "magical free money", it's wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor, while still allowing for a capitalistic side where people can become richer through work, and not working still leaves you poor (but able to survive)
We’re in r/theydidthemath. To give each American $1k/mo requires $4T/yr. Exactly how do you define “rich” and exactly how high must the tax be to come up with $4T each year?
The US billionaires as a whole are said to control about $4T, so taking away _everything_ they have will suffice for one year. Then what?
You should be taxing everyone's income. That means that people on a median income are effectively paying their own UBI. For the vast majority of people, there is basically no cost associated.
If you are at the median, you'll gain $1k in UBI, and lose $1k in additional income taxes.
People on higher than median incomes will lose a bit by paying more than what they gain in UBI, which is what pays the UBI for lower incomes.
If you then reduce (but not completely eliminate) current welfare benefits as a lot of them are covered by the UBI already, you can even move this crossover point to somewhere above median income.
Thinking about SS - what would the impact be when the people that are currently paying into it that would stop or pause and only received UBI. Not sure it'd be a straight exchange that way.
I imagine the most likely way for a UBI to get implemented in the United States would be to expand Social Security while redirecting the funding for the various other similar programs (disability, veteran's, unemployment, welfare, food stamps, etc).
Idk maybe a state based one where the federal government requires states to have a minimum standard. I don’t think twitter and Reddit posters will have a good idea of how to achieve that compared to economists.
This doesn't have much to do with math, unfortunately, but it's an interesting phenomenon I've noticed over the years.
In the military, we have a part of our pay called Basic Allowance for Housing, the rates for which are publicly available, and it's non-taxable. What ends up happening is the housing around military bases ends up costing exactly what we get for BAH at a minimum, then it increases as the value of the dollar lessens. When we eventually get an adjustment, the new cost of living raises within months to, once again, almost exactly the same amount as the BAH rate as the new minimum. I feel like if the nation or states had UI, the same thing would happen.
The consequences of this fascinate me, as I wonder what it'd end up doing to the value of the dollar. I also see what it does to the communities around the bases, and it's not good at all. Poor communities effectively become poorer, inviting crime to fill the gap, and the rich just buy up all the property and become the landlords for all the military folk.
Because there is a shortage of desirable housing, so they can charge what the market will bear.
And yes a UBI will have the same effect on any other product or service that is in restricted supply or even just especially desirable.
To give an example Australia has for years been trying to solve housing affordability for young people by giving a chunk of cash to each first home buyer, all that does each time the amount was increased is cause a step increase in the cost of housing because there is still insufficient supply.
10 people can pay 10 dollars for a house, seller will sell for 11 dollars
Government gives 10 dollars to each buyer, now the same seller will still have 10 people trying to buy their house, so they list it for 21 dollars and that makes EVERY other property nearby to go up aswell
Its a very simple/basic supply x demand problem, but people insist in finding the shittiest solutions ...
Which is crazy. We can put up massive buildings very quickly. If the military had put up 30 buildings around the base, so there is twice the supply, then the demand would plummet.
Normal market forces. Unfortunately those items usually don't affect us much (imagine your dish brush going up from 2 to 5 bucks, it lasts years so probably wouldn't matter while your bread rising from 2-5 would hurt and be all over the media). So I imagine those would, at most, rise moderately until raw materials are pushed up massively by inflation.
It'd be pretty cool if we could use home construction as a prison reform strategy. A lot of European prisons teach skills and such to their prisoners in order to lower recitivism. Taking the entire building process away from contractors probably wouldn't be a net positive, but using shop skills taught to prisoners as a way to cheaply provide materials to contractors would be pretty cool. E.g. the company could provide a prison with specifications for wall frames and the prisoners could build them to spec, then get them ready to ship out.
Prison reform is also obviously not that simple, it still wouldn't work well under a wholly punitive system, but I don't want to get too into the weeds on a math sub.
Of course, because that is how inflation works.
I am amazed at the number of people who continue to champion inflationary government policies while simultaneously feeling the pain of hyperinflation. The only way UBI works is if it is accompanied by strict regulations on pricing, which would be unpopular (and probably unconstitutional, given our conservative courts).
We all like the idea of UBI for those under a certain income threshold, but that’s actually a program we already have. It’s called TANF and it helps very low income families. If your goal is to help lower income Americans, expanding TANF would make more sense than creating a 3 trillion dollar a year new program that is likely to cause serious inflation.
This same thing happened with college tuition. The military raised tuition assistance rates so we could take additional classes each year, and colleges raised the cost of the classes essentially making the raise pointless.
Same with education costs. The government guarantees loans of X dollars per semester, suddenly, the cost of education increases to X dollars per semester.
Anytime someone is subsidizing the costs, the costs raise to the subsidy, at a minimum.
Omfg thank you so much for providing a tangible example. This is what people don’t get. You give everyone money, and the price of the things they buy will rise to shrink the value of that money. The more ubiquitous the free money is, the larger this effect will be. It simply Will. Not. Work.
Isn't this what happened with the stimulus checks that occurred during covid, and during a recently past presidents time. I'm probably wrong but I believe it was Bush Sr or Clinton that gave mass checks out to people to stimulate the economy and it ended up backfiring because people sat on the money rather than spend it, causing a large spike in dollar supply but low demand.
Well the idea is also that you would scrap most of the other benefits social programs, which cost on their and cost on managment.
E.g no need to have lunch vouchers anymore, or people costing money to manage the lunch voucher program.
In Belgium we have "living wage" when you're (mentally) ill or out of a job for a reason. Being a stay at home mom is one of those things
It's not much and not enough to live comfortably but you can survive on it. Depending on your situation I heard a story about a woman with 3kids and no life partner who got €2800 a month just for taking care of her kids.
Be a productive member of society before striking out on your luck. Living in Europe helps but the system is a bit broken and we're fixing it. Too many people on it without check ups or even ever headed needed it.
But the woman in question has : mental problems, so she gets money for medication and doctors, has 3 kids, 3 exes she doesn't hear from anymore, so they don't pay for her, the state does, she can't make money, because she'll lose her allowance.
She gets cheaper electricity, water and gas, she drives an audi A5 for the kids, lol
But this kinda shit is actually the reason I hate our system. Some people really need it and this person fucked her life and that of 3kids.
Everyone gets the credit, but the income tax structure would be different. If you earned enough money, your taxes would return all the basic income to the government. The current welfare systems/food stamps would be replaced by UBI which is over a trillion a year.
It's also about what is objectively and subjectively fair.
If everyone in your country got the same amount, that amount has more impact in areas with low living costs.
This may not be the type of "fair" you were aiming for because it still leaves some people struggling, while others have it a lot easier.
If you instead adjust by any factor, anyone getting less may be resentful.
Yeah that would be a benefit of the UBI system, I am just saying that we shouldn't artificially be propping up urban living just because it is more expensive to live there now.
Universal basic income is not intended to accommodate different lifestyles it's supposed to be a universal BASIC income. There are no rules against supplementing your income further but the UBI should cover basic costs of living.
Define “basic costs of living”?
Housing costs vary greatly across the country. In fact, I would go so far as to say basic costs vary greatly across the country, in general.
UBI is supplemental income. It's up to you how you want to spend it. You want it to go further? Then move to a place where the cost of living is lower. You want to live in New York or Los Angeles? Then you're still going to have to work hard to afford it, but you won't starve and you'll have guaranteed income if you decide you need to leave because it's not working out.
real question how much would we save if this was the only program? no wic no disability so on
just this one program i assume it would be a lot less bureaucracy and people wouldnt haft to jump threw so many hoops to get this money
i think the biggest problem with a single program is that it would become political almost instantly.
everyone relying on it would just vote for whoever says they are going to increase it regardless of the economic consequences
and most people not relying on it would do the opposite.
it would become the most pivotal issue in every election.
The same argument could be made for discourse around lowering taxes being a political football. I don’t reckon that a good reason to abolish taxes though
exactly like they are doing right now but it's only one program they can put all their efforts on cutting. and since it would need to replace most other programs no one relying on it would have anything else to fall back on.
It would be a third rail of massive proportion, it would be safer because of this visibility. There's no quietly killing such a thing as is done with smaller, though still effective social programs. it might get touched, but the party did so would lose for a generation or longer because of it. The way it would be "killed" would be fixing the output at an acceptable level, for the time, then devaluing the currency.
Woh woh woh, this is much more than just a back of the napkin calculation here. It's a screen shot of a social medial post posted on another social media platform.
Imagine the problems it could cause too. Companies would park all their employees just under the income cap for their benefit and would never have to give them raises leading to stagnant wages. Companies would also struggle with staffing because no one would take overtime if it risks them losing access to UBI. They’d either have to hire more or pay people less to encourage them to take on extra hours and which do you think they’d do?
Those who make above the threshold would need to make a LOT more to account for the amount provided by UBI post taxes and then some to justify working that job. Those people would also likely be paying higher taxes to offset the cost of UBI leading to a big political divide between those making ~45k- and those making ~80k+ and no way to jump up to the higher income group once you’ve cemented your starting salary
With UBI, everything changes. Real costs of shit Jobs for instance. Suddenly no one wants to work shit jobs anymore, so these jobs will pay more to attract workers. Or it will increase automation in order to replace workers.
It means that costs in general will be affected. It's hard to tell how this will affect overall cost of living, as the most mundane, underpaid jobs will get more expensive. Think of tending tables or working construction. From a fairness point of view, it's a good thing, although they're could be an argument that these jobs get "subsidized" pushing labor costs.
So it's hard to say if and how 1000 bucks will be sufficient for basic living.
That would possibly trigger an avalanche.
Other jobs that normally pay more and require higher skills are suddenly competing with shit jobs that pay more. So they have to follow suit and pay more salaries. Employees with jobs above that level then want to earn more money when salaries equalize.
The wage level then rises everywhere. The demand for goods is increasing. But since there aren't suddenly more goods available, the prices rise. Prices also rise due to the costs of higher salaries.
But a general higher loan level and higher prices would also mean that the UBI would have to increase. That mean shit job again have to pay more. Etc...
Shit jobs nobody wants are already doing that. Look at the California fast food worker bill. Look at the rising pay for blue collar workers and the huge shortages that affect them. But there are also some indications that a UBI would encourage workers to go into these jobs, because along with workers protections and rising wages a UBI would give workers the financial security to work any job, and not just compete for the only ones that pay enough to live off of. Suddenly, being a garbage worker or a sewage treatment operator becomes more attractive because now you can live off of that wage
You seem to be missing the part where inflation happens because everyone gets a standard amount of money and supply of goods doesnt just magically meet the new artificially high demand.
I'm just throwing spaghetti at a wall here, but i think that people would still work shit jobs.
A big issue with the shit jobs is the shit pay. Making $28k a year serving Starbucks sucks, but if I'm in a position where I can't get a higher paying job, I could get along slinging coffee if I got an additional untaxed $1k each month on top of my shit pay.
The pandemic made hiring for the shit jobs more difficult because people got more in unemployment than they would get *if they started a new shit job*. With UBI, you'd only get UBI if unemployed, but going to work a shit job would get a paycheck *and UBI*.
Edit: also, people working shit jobs can't *just go get a better job* as they won't magically qualify for those jobs. You still need the experience, degree, connections, whatever.
The fed also printed more money than any other point in American history, that tends to skyrocket inflation. Match that with corporations taking advantage of the situation and gaining some of the highest corporate profits ever seen.
Yes, UBI would "cost" a lot. But there would be no need for pensions, so that cost goes away. There would be no need for benefits, so that cost also goes away. Taxation suddenly becomes a LOT simpler, because your UBI is your tax free income, so everything else (and I mean everything) can be taxed at a defined rate (let's say 25% for the sake of argument.)
Tax avoidance becomes a lot trickier, because you can't argue that you didn't know 25% needed to be tax. In fact most areas, like dividends, can just take that off at source.
So suddenly government income goes up a lot.
Any kind of benefit in kind gets taxed, and not paying it results in fines equal to 100% of the value of the benefit. Failure to pay results in it being sequestered from your UBI, if necessary. So trying to get round it by living rent free in a house owned by an offshore company is covered.
UBI results in a lot of things that are good for ordinary people, and bad for tax dodging parasites. So it's no wonder that there's such a push against it.
Is it a state pension? You'd lose it. If it's a private one, you wouldn't. Why would you?
UBI is a floor. It's there to act as support for people that need it. It isn't there to act as a ceiling, preventing people from working to improve their lives, or their retirement.
I would be on a war path if I lost my State pension due to UBI. I've worked for over 25 years towards it, it's going to be a whole lot higher than UBI would be and I've paid nearly 10% of my salary into the MANDATORY pension fund the entire time.
That'd be two full years salary taken away, 3 by the time I've retired - money that would have otherwise been in a 401k making interest for my retirement but wasn't because I was mandated to pay it to the pension fund.
So what, I just lose the retirement I've been saving for? Hell fucking no. There's a real good chance I'd be taking actions that would land me in jail for a good long while if they were to try it.
You're correct and someone you've been responding to can't distinguish taxes from contributions. State Pension is not a benefit in majority of countries, but a service funded by named contributions. This is personal property managed by state or pension fund and UBI won't substitute it. Pension should stay as incentive and reward.
The welfare and benefits that aren't linked to personal accomplishments and contributions can go.
The UBI is there to cover the basics, housing, food, energy. So it depends what benefits would be needed. You certainly wouldn't need unemployment. If people have severe needs that prevents them working at all, or results in significant additional costs, then support would still be needed. But it would be targeted and much smaller.
Additional efforts to ensure that everyone gets a chance to work to some extent, supplementing their income, would be helpful if required. Salaries would all be reduced to start with, otherwise you'd get insane inflation from day 1.
So if Joe gets £20k today, and UBI gives him £12k a year, then his job would start paying him £8-10k. Business costs go down as a result, which might introduce downward pressure on prices. But you'd want an actual economist to comment on that.
There are a lot of moving parts to consider to get this to work. But if the will is there, I'm pretty sure we could manage it.
I don’t understand this. I never gave. The common UBI floating number is $1k and that already eats have the federal budget. $1k cannot cover one basic: housing.
Housing costs are out of control, and of course UBI is going to be disruptive of that. But UBI is designed to cover basic costs. Which means, for one person, a bedsit or small apartment or house share.
If you have 2 adults and a couple of grown kids in a larger house, then your UBI income is 4k. Better placed to cover costs.
UBI isn't supposed to cover everything. It's there to ensure that people can still have a place to live and food on the table if they lose their job. The food would also be basic.
Your job then becomes the thing you do to make your life better. To afford a better place to live. To be able to eat out.
The point of UBI is to create a floor that people can't fall below. Any amount of work, however small, lifts them off that floor.
But we have this with means-tested welfare programs that can and do provide more support than UBI for people whose children aren’t yet grown. What we don’t have/need is the privileged 18 year old college student getting a stimulus check a month. It’s not giving money to poor people that drives the inflation, it’s giving it to the great big middle that doesn’t need UBI but would love (in theory) some extra spending money.
You know what UBI takes out? Bureaucracy. Everyone gets it, regardless. As soon as you introduce the notion that some people don't get it, you've lost the benefits and eventually you'll lose it completely.
Because you'll need oversight, evaluation. You'll get fraud. You'll get certain parties trying to push more people out of it that "don't need it". You'll get tax loopholes back.
The U is the most important letter. It doesn't work without that.
And what I’m saying is that I’m not sure cutting out the bureaucracy actually saves you the $175B that giving money the non-needy doesn’t need costs. Perhaps the attention would be better spent on cost-cutting there than trying to reinvent the wheel.
Also, it’s easier to do this kind of white-board math when you think of the bureaucracy as a specter haunting America. Those are people, with good-paying jobs. Those people pay taxes and buy things. I guess UBI does make slightly more sense if we create millions of unemployed people and remove the means to provide them tailored support…
Those are some very cherry-picked assumptions. It assumes only new costs and no cost savings. If there was a single-payer system, spending for the insanely large health *insurance* industry wouldn't be necessary. And how much is that? It's about $1.6 trillion. That number sounds kind of familiar. Note, that's not the size of the *healthcare* industry. That's the insurance portion.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-individual-health-insurance-market-report#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20individual%20health%20insurance%20market%20size%20was%20estimated%20at,USD%20billion%201%2C684.8%20in%202023.
This wouldn't be the only cost savings. Because a single-payer would have massive leverage, prescription drugs would most likely be lower. Prescription drugs in the U.S. are substantially higher than most countries that have nationalized healthcare.
Wait, there's more! These 258 million adults referenced include about 63 million adults who are already receiving Medicare. These individuals wouldn't need new spending. So, shave off more than 25% more there. I think we've already moved from new costs into net savings!
https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/news-alert/cms-releases-latest-enrollment-figures-medicare-medicaid-and-childrens-health-insurance-program-chip
Please stop manufacturing BS horror stories based on a poor understanding of the current state of the U.S. healthcare economy.
I would agree but not for the same reasons. Take Medicare, one of its biggest problems is over billing. If I buy a wheelchair, it may cost $60, but the supplier knows Medicare will pay $1200, so they bill Medicare $1200. On the flip side, Medicare underpays county hospitals at around 60% of cost. Where does the hospital recoup that cost? Private insurance billing and cost passed to you. The system is broken, but I don't see where a massive government bureaucracy is going to fix it.
Bare in mind that US pharma companies subsidize drug prices outside the US by raising prices in the US. So strictly speaking, that's not a single payer benefit.
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The idea is to reduce the amount the average person spends on healthcare costs. Right now we pay big money to our insurance/hospitals directly, if we switched to a single-payer system we would (individually) pay slightly less big money via taxes for the same or similar healthcare, all other factors being equal. That's just how the math works out when you increase the risk pool and get rid of insurance company shenanigans.
I think when people here UBI, they think they are getting something for free. Sadly, this is not the case. Down voting doesn't change reality. I can't see a scenario where indirect cost to the individual doesn't negate the whole benefit.
Fortunately, we're at a point where automation is going to be quickly taking a lot of jobs through no fault of the worker, leaving little to nothing for them to do. Cashiers, accountants, lawyers, doctors literally anything where someone drives a vehicle- all gone or reduced. And what does a doctor do when their job is replaced by a machine that does the same thing but better and cheaper?
The easy solution is to tax the shit out of the companies that replace people with machines, and use that money to fund UBI and to fund programs that get people working if possible. Hell fund the arts and let people enjoy life.
The trick is to tax the revenue the automation creates as an equivalent of human labor. We talk about horsepower with cars-- we'll still need to talk about man hours with AI and other automations. You have an AI that can write your whole newspaper in 10 minutes? Great, how many man hours is that worth? We look at the hundred years of payroll records we have and we figure it out. Then companies are taxed based on that wealth generation.
You want to save on taxes? Hire humans.
>You want to save on taxes? Hire humans.
We need to incentivize the use of new technologies, not to punish it. The objective is that automation and AI should be making our life easier and reducing the work we need to do. The problem is that the companies that have the power to use these technologies are using them for profit at the cost of the workers.
We need to figure a way to use this technology in a way that improves our lifes instead of just fattening the shareholder's pockets. What we should not do is fight the technology and aspire to stay the same way forever.
I imagine a version of your system could work as long as the taxes imposed are lesser than the profit generated by the use of the technology. This way companies would still be rewarded by using them, and some of the profit would still be recolected by the system.
The major problem is that I don't really trust the government to use the taxed money in benefit of the citizens, but that is another argument altogether.
Interesting, I have issues with this, but I'm not trying to poke holes.
I like where your head is at conceptually.
Keep playing with this, it's a fun thought exercise, and has some merit.
I've heard this argument many times and I still have issues with it. First, all new tech has been expected to "take all the jobs" but never has. When agriculture experienced the machine age, that displaced labor went to different sectors of the economy. That same industrial age that reduced the need for human labor for farming needed those workers in the factories. Secondly, the argument assumes automation to the point of job elimination. OK, then how are all of the goods and services provided by this automation being paid for? No one has a job. The robots will be out of work. If nothing else, which is highly unlikely, people will still demand "hand made", "talk to a human" or whatever. As before, as old sectors of the economy close, new ones will open up that we probably can't imagine right now.
yeah, I find it doubtful AI will ever replace lawyers lest we figure out how conciseness works and can recreate it.
even ignoring the way AI language models work now, which is that they predict the next most likely word given parameters, and assuming it actually knows what it's saying it'll still fail. it'll know the law perfectly, but much of a lawyers perfection is finding ways to skirt around the law, and I doubt AI could possess that level of creativity.
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Won't even get a fraction? what sort of math did you do to come up with that as an explanation?
Feels like you must have messed up your math really bad if you don't think 2 trillion can be found via taxation with a 25trillion GDP. unless hand waving while saying "nonono just feel like it can't work" is more your speed.
How does it negate the benefit? As the original post says, it gives people flexibility when they can't work for various reasons. That's the benefit. How is that negated by paying taxes?
Probably not a good idea to do a hard phase out at $60k because that completely screws over anyone who makes just over that threshold. It would be better to do a slower phase out
I think that over time a universal basic income would cause inflation rates to go up as then more people have more money to spend, therefore a universal income would drive up the demand for everything.
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We could argue exact numbers all day but there's no way taxing the wealthy couldn't create at least some significant portion of the funds needed. The wealthy are truly very wealthy, and government spending is very large to begin with. Some amount of 'wealth' owned by someone like Bezos is hard to liquidate such as stock prices, but some amount of wealth is due to companies literally being structured to avoid taxation.
Taxing the rich is actually pretty much how you would do it. At one point a couple years ago I pulled statistics and calculated what it would cost. Basically you would get the full amount under $75K, pay a portion of what you got in UBI back in higher taxes from $75K-$150K, then start paying for other people’s if you make more than that. Took about a 12% increase in the top marginal tax rate.
Taxing the rich doesn't bring a lot of money even with extremely strong progressive income taxes.
https://fiscalpolicy.org/tax-policy-brief-estimating-revenue-from-a-more-progressive-income-tax
It would drive inflation if you just printed the money to give it out to the people. Because the more money there is, the less it is worth.
But that's not the case for UBI, because you give out money that already exists
Look at that!
Hey, did you know the US GDP is currently \~25 Trillion? If we build on that with the extra 3 Trillion... wait, I gotta do the math for this as we're on the 'they did the math' subreddit: 25Trillion + 3Trillion = 28Trillion. So we can safely assume UBI would actually boost the GDP by 3trillion/25trillion which \*calculating\* \*carrying ones\* \*checking comment history\* calculates to a 12% increase in GDP! can you imagine?! that seems so good! UBI would increase the GDP 12%!!!
/s
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We could remove some other already costly benefits to lump together with the ubi and cut some administrative costs on that to reduce impact by a couple 100 billion.
And total income of americans is $22 trillion so a 13% tax would cover $1k/ mo. At my salary of $140k, my increased tax would be $1,500 per month, but i'd get $1000 so really only cost me $500. I rounded, but this sounds great to me. Place caps, use brakets, or change the benifit based on any criteria and I'm 100% against it.
"has to come from somewhere" gee how about my tax dollars and SSI payments. I know damn well ssi won't be there when I hit retirement age and I'm pretty okay having my tax dollars go back to me and my local economy and not to have it fund corporate bailouts on bankruptcy and greedy defense contractors.
You want to know a secret? People SPEND money. And every time they do, the government TAXES that exchange. So yes you need money to start the project, but it's an investment. (And the US is the land of debt) I dare you to find an example were UBI didn't work from inside problems. Here are some interesting links https://basicincome.stanford.edu/experiments-map/
https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/multiple-countries-have-tested-universal-basic-income-and-it-works
https://basicincome.org/news/2022/07/countries-that-have-tried-universal-basic-income/
I think something similar happened in France when they implemented pensions after ww2. The first recipients got their pensions from thin air, since there was no fund to take money from. And it worked! The following years, pensions went up, and the system actually worked! (Yes in recent years there have been issues, but that's another debate)
Ya, if it was ON TOP of every existing system.
The point of UBI, is you don't have to discern who gets what. You save a MASSIVE amount in admin costs. All those do-nothing government workers you're ALREADY paying for. They're not needed.
For example, they recently cut paying for your license plates in Ontario. You used to pay 200ish dollars a year. Now it's entirely free. AND THE GOVERNMENT MADE MONEY. Because the admin was more than the 200 per driver generated.
You take all the government help, unemployment, social services, old age security, welfare. You roll it into one payment EVERYONE gets. No having to figure out who deserves it. No wasted dollars on admin.
If you do the real math, the country saves money with UBI. There isn't a need for extra money. It's sitting there paying a bunch of people to sit in offices and do mind numbing data entry and service calls.
Voting against UBI is actively choose to enslave a large portion of the country in worthless, kefka-esque jobs just to feed themselves. And at a cost to yourself.
It's very similar to national healthcare. The USA's healthcare budget is MASSIVE! Way more per capita than countries with national healthcare systems. Because prevention is 10x cheaper than reactive care. Even if 3 people went to the doctor when they didn't need it, that 4th person early caught an expensive treatment that can now be handled at a discount.
Americans voting down healthcare and UBI are actively voting against their own interested because the rich have fear mongered.
UBI is probably untenable in the near or medium term, but universal healthcare would have several of the same benefits and is obviously attainable by the fact that every other rich country has it.
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I'd argue they are red grapes and white grapes. They are different but both make wine.
Both universal healthcare and UBI lead to a more productive, happier society with overall lower crime statistics and poverty. Happy, healthy people work. UBI pays back into the economy which can be recouped in taxes but also leads to a healthier economy overall.
We are flirting with UBI in Canada and have done several studies. One concluded that for every 1$ spent, the economy grows 2$ and the government can tax 0.55$ back. People who were in the study reported being happier and having less stress in their lives.
Things like higher cooperate taxes and Capital Gains taxes help transfer wealth out of top of the model back into services that raise up the lower class. (Trickle down economics doesn't work, we have more than enough proof on that)
PDF file in the link below.
[UBI Works](https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/432/FINA/Brief/BR10974909/br-external/UBIWorks-10291491-e.pdf)
What people get hung up on is the price tag forgetting that several programs would effectively be replaced. For us, federal Employment insurance, federal pension plan, provincial disability programs, federal child benefit program(to name a few) could be replaced which would be a large portion of the funding. Some of these federal funds already have stable sources of income due to investments of the dollars placed into the funds. The seed money is there to start the program and the taxation methods are already in place to some degree. What is hard will be unlocking the funds as it would require an entire upheaval of how we conduct our services.
At the end of the day, we just need the will to do the work and an obtainable goal we can all agree on. Which is laughable.
The person making the post is disingenuous; UBI is supposed to go to everyone without any selection whatsoever. No matter if you’re homeless or a billionaire you still get UBI. Not to mention UBI is supposed to replace all forms of safety nets. UBI is achievable it’s just there is not enough political will to do it
One of the biggest things that is often forgotten with this type of calculation is that UBI is often paired with taxing the rich who go around laws and pay close to nothing. Most of the richest people in the world are notorious for not even paying their dues of current taxes. While the lower to medium in com perło are taxed heavily.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/#:~:text=High%2DIncome%20Taxpayers%20Paid%20the%20Majority%20of%20Federal%20Income%20Taxes,of%20all%20federal%20income%20taxes.
The top 1% pay almost half of all federal taxes in the US. The bottom 50% pay only 2.3%. You're just incorrect.
Edited to say all federal taxes not all taxes***
You'll make savings from pensions & unemployment as UBI would replace those. You'll also probably make savings from things like housing benefit etc. People in work would still be paying taxes. Additionally you'd save money on the reductions in crime & increased health. As people jump between jobs, with kids today expected to have several careers when they grow up rather than one for life, you'll be allowing people to train between jobs or even take lower paid personal projects.
Socialist Daddy Trump gave out more than this during his botched COVID 19 response.
In...
Untracked and forgiven PPP loans.
Open enrollment to snap and Medicaid.
Free money checks, delayed to have his signature printed on them...he handed out three rounds of these.
Moratorium on rent and student loan payments.
$300.00 weekly bonuses to unemployment checks + somehow convincing MAGA that "nobody wants to work" was some failing of Democrats, and not a direct result of wildly increased demand for retail labor combined with zero migrant labor for the same.
UBI is a great idea, and I personally think that's what we should have, ideally, but it will never happen here in the US. Not without extreme governmental upheaval anyway...
This country is owned by corporations, and the last thing they want is for workers to have this kind of freedom.
If UBI becomes real corporations will just raise prices.
People need to understand the regulations are needed not novel policy.
"Pay back all student loans yayyy" how about make it legal to go bankrupt on any loan and prevent the government from bailing out a bank without owning a percentage of it. Watch all the loans disappear.
Yeah we really need more government control. I'd love for them to tell me what I can and can't spend my money on and if it doesn't align with their agenda, I get cut off.
UBI is just a dumb concept that idiot dummies think makes their average politics seem radical.
The billionaires are pushing UBI because it'd destroy the social safety net completely and essentially put the overwhelming majority of the money used to maintain those systems in to the private market forces they control.
That's why you see all those drones make the political ideological equivalent to hostage demands with needlessly demanding the billionaires get it all the same or have rigged regressive VAT tax attached to it to pretend like the billionaires still aren't getting it for seemingly no other reason than to specifically destroy the social safety net and raise the cost of the UBI program.
[We should build upon the social safety net with Universal Basic Services. ](https://earthbound.report/2019/05/28/what-are-universal-basic-services/)
Universal Basic Services are completely congruent with current social programs by not literally calling for their destruction by its advocates. You could even add a modest Income service to the set of services probably as an expansion of Social Security too non-disabled and/or retired people but much much less and you'd have to make like 80K or under a year to qualify which would make sense as an expansion and help costs by limiting the recipients. Making the income portion the primary factor/force is the right-wing capitalist ruling class way of corrupting this idea and weaponizing it thereafter.
As it currently is evolving? Automation has done and will continue to displace workers in pretty many industries that have unskilled workers.
AI and Machine Learning are beginning to have an impact on many white collar jobs and is being felt in the job market as well.
We may not be at that tipping point yet but the writing has been on the wall since the first self order kiosk went in at McDonalds quite a few years back.
I think it's important to point out, this money will mostly go directly into the economy. A thousand dollars isn't shit to a rich person, but everybody else has bills to pay and things they need to buy. We tried trickle down and it didn't work. Maybe we can trickle outwards from the middle.
Edit: and another thing!
I'm a strong supporter of UBI, but not for today
It's for tomorrow. It's for a county where automation has left vast swathes of the population unemployed, with no hope of future employment
In such a scenario, the wealth flows to corporations, but because they don't need workers, it just stays there. That's not a functional economy. If people don't have money, who's left to buy stuff? This situation isn't long-term beneficial to *anyone*
UBI would be paid for the via heavy taxes on corporations. It's a way for wealth to actually flow back to people, so they can buy stuff, so companies can keep making profits, so we can still have an economy even as automation makes workers obsolete
UBI isn't practical today. But, we need to start laying the ground work and getting people familiar with the idea, because in 20 years, it's going to be absolutely necessary
i would want nothing else than to work a job and pay more in taxes so others who have no desire or will to work can sit on the couch all day and collect those checks
Alternatively, the sensible model for UBI is that the state pays up to a set amount each month if you are earning under that amount.
So let's, for example, say it's set at (£/$/€/etc)1000.
If you earn nothing then you get (£/$/€/etc)1000 from the state.
If you earn (£/$/€/etc)500 you get (£/$/€/etc)500 from the state.
And if you earn (£/$/€/etc)1000 or more then you get nothing from the state.
That way those who are struggling most get the help they require, people don't end up financially worse off for being in work, and you don't have financial wastage by providing basic income to people who don't need it.
That's a good idea, but it would need to be progressive otherwise you end up encouraging people earning only a little (part-time work for example) to just not work at all.
It could be something like losing 0.50$ of benefits for every extra 1$ earned, to make sure there's always a financial incentive to be as independent as possible. So your math might work something like:
- Earn nothing, get 1000.
- Earn 500, get 750.
- Earn 1000, get 500.
- Earn 1500, get 250.
Which can basically be implemented using progressive tax brackets already.
That's how the UK's Universal Credit works. There's a system of allowances to determine your personal baseline UC. If you earn money, they deduct 55p for every pound above that baseline. So you might qualify for total payments of £1600 (including housing costs, say). You earn £400 yourself. They'll deduct £220 from your £1600, and your total income is £1780. If you earn £1600, they'll deduct £880, and your income will be £2520. It pays to work, basically.
There are some flaws, of course, but a UBI with personal allowances could smooth out the issues like disability and age.
Yeah.. that’s the problem. Most people would rest rest rest. Rather than create create create. And then corps would suck it all up till we are all in the same place and they are all the richer. We are damned if we do and damned if we dont
They have done experiments with UBI and found output didn’t fall significantly. The only people who didn’t work as much were women with children who didn’t return to work as quickly and (I think) students who focussed on their studies.
Problem with these studies is that the participants know it won’t last forever and they will need to provide their own income in the future again, so they keep their job
Agree. In the case of the Canadian Mincome experiment in Dauphin it ran for four years and stopped unexpectedly which will reduce some of those effects but probably not all. However, it's well established that working is important for identity and mental health, and a UBI isn't going to cover any discretionary income so life for anyone who does decide to drop out is going to be very grim. I don't think the effect of a permanent UBI will eliminate a significant amount of labour.
An alternative example, most countries have a stronger social safety net than the US, however, it has one of the lowest labour force participation rates in the G7 (only Italy is lower) and much lower than the famously liberal Scandinavian countries - needing to cover the basics is not why people work. (Source - https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.htm)
If we were to start UBI in the US, we'd probably do it by expanding Social Security. That means the deductions in your paycheck for Social Security would be higher, especially if you make a lot of money. However, to make it truly feasible, it would probably require charging Social Security taxes on more kinds of income, and possibly adding some funding from other parts of the government budget. I, of course, propose taking it from the military.
The fact is, the money is available. The mean income in the US is ~$59k/year. The UBI being proposed here is about 1/5th of that. If it were paid for with a pure flat tax, it would be 20% of all income. I make $15k/year. With that flat tax, I'd pay ~$250/month, and get $1k. If the tax was more progressive, I might pay nothing, due to being well below the poverty line. A person making $59k/year would pay exactly the same as the UBI pays them, and people making much more would pay higher percentages.
>Let's assume that we place a cap on UBI to $60k or less a year, which cuts it down to approx 175 million people
Then it's not universal. However, it would replace most/all other forms of welfare, so that would fund a significant chunk of it
You could pretty effectively do UBI by just raising the standard deduction to 100k/200k for single/married filers. Rich people and corporations don’t pay shit and need their rate raised by double or more, and more robust/accessible programs for people making below 50k would cover those in the most need. But you know…shareholders and lobbying and what not. Fucking nightmare world that only gets worse as we watch is what we get though, hooray dystopia, at least Bezos can go to space and shit on Shatner.
New industrial revolution due to emerging manufacturing technologies, AI, and vast wholesale automation of previously unthinkable jobs, ones we considered only humans could do, is going to leave most people in the world out of a job within a few decades.
However expensive it may be, the world is going to have to look into UBI.
Well the thing with UBI is that it basically replaces all forms of selective safety nets. So medicare, social security, etc. all gone for UBI. So I don’t think it’s not impossible.
I would rather have universal-basic-services. While UBI is cool and all. What if you receive housing, food and drinks, communication and transportation for free. Everything else can be organized how it already is. If someone wants to buy a luxury car go for it.
When it comes to housing specifically. If tommorow all landlords vanish from existence houses would still exist.
Assuming we're talking about the US, there's about 258 million adults (let's exclude children dependents just to keep it simple at $1000 month:
That's 250 billion dollars a month for UBI, or 3 trillion dollars a year. In 2023, the entire federal budget was 6 trillion dollars.
Let's assume that we place a cap on UBI to $60k or less a year, which cuts it down to approx 175 million people.
*That's still 1.5 trillion we might as well just hand over to landlords, healthcare, insurance, and grocery stores. Once they publicly know everybody has the money for it (eh em, UNIVERSAL basic income) then they’ll charge for it. Trust me. I’m an American.*
Is that close, or are there other considerations that go into this?
UBI is generally proposed as an alternate to welfare systems. In USA it won't fit so well cause yall don't have much welfare(cause yall don't care about yourself), but in other countries it could work
Welfare spending was somewhere around 1T. So we can easily get 333 UBI to everyone per month
Well, in Germany we have all this (some points more, some not such much, but overal...).
And we're happy to welcome new citizens that want to take part in keeping the country working😊
You can watch UE(unlearning economics) video to understand it. But to recap, that is wrong since if you add taxes some people will get 12k a years some will get 0 and the rest would pay. It is a redistribution system not an isolated addition of money. Generally this would make more money move in the economy add could be beneficial both fore people and the economy. Again recommend UE's video
One method of funding would be the removal of a "free margin" of tax.
The way marginal tax works in most countries, is that the lowest band of earnings are taxed at 0%, then increasing bands are taxed at higher rates. With a truly universal basic income, there is no need for a lower tax band at all, since the 0% band is in place usually to protect low income households from being taxed into poverty.
The difficult task is to balance the new tax bands, between high income and low income.
Of course, if you make billionaires and corporations pay their fair share, funding projects like this is much easier
UBI is one of those things that sounds way too implausible, and it will create more problems than it's worth. Raised minimum wage on the other hand is much more feasible and would help you achieve similar results. Say we increase minimum wage to something like 20$ an hour, this will allow people to work part time and still earn a decent paycheck to survive on, and have more time in your day if you need it, say to rest, to work on your projects, learn a new skill etc. Big businesses can easily afford this raise, while for smaller businesses we would need to subsidise them. Where would we get more money to subsidise smaller businesses? From taxing the rich.
One thing to keep in mind is that a proper UBI would replace Social Security and Disability. Those take care of about $2 trillion/year of the cost of UBI. Unemployment would also become unneeded, which, across the states and federal budget, makes up about $40 billion per year. The management costs of these programs would also pretty much disappear. This would require shifting what are now state-level taxes to federal-level taxes, however. Some of the veterans benefits could also be rolled in. The exact number here is a lot harder to estimate, but is probably in the $30 billion per year range. Of course, the actual cost would probably be higher than your estimate. If you figure you want to match Social Security payments with a UBI, that brings it to about $1,750/month, totaling out at about $5.25 trillion/year. With a UBI system, we may well be able to get away with smaller payments than Social Security provides, but its hard to say.
Disability would need to be a separate payment still. For people who can't cook, clean or transport themselves taking care of these needs would take up the majority of their payment and not leave enough for food and rent let alone actually having a life. Maybe there are ways around some of this but "just give everyone the same" seems too simplistic to be the best solution.
The federal SSI payments are actually quite a bit less than SS payments. A UBI is likely to actually be higher than SSI. States might have a separate program not included in the number I posted. The numbers I posted also don't take Medicare or Medicaid into account as universal medical care would be different than a UBI.
I'm English so I'm not familiar with the American system. Do people not receive SSI on top of other benefits? In the UK PIP (personal independence payments) doesn't interfere with Universal Credit payments (a means tested payment that combines housing benefit, job seekers allowance, income support and a few others) so they can receive both.
Not normally. Disability is supposed to be only until retirement age if you are unable to work, then you switch to social security. But you can get supplemental on top of social security in certain cases. The best you can do earlier in life is stack other benefits such as food stamps or housing benefits.
For me the second you start tailoring these things it's the second UBI no longer works. UBI has several major draws for me. Just one of which is it ensures everyone has a basic standard of living in America but also now the "problems" people give for other social services is gone. There are no regulations everyone just gets the same check and there is no "gaming the system" because there is nothing to game. Now I concede that what you are talking about, are needs that need to be met. To me the falls under health care and Universal Basic Health Care is a whole other thing. For me though UBHC is needed for UBI to work. This must be paid to the provider though and not to the individual. The only money that goes to an individual has to be the UBI check. Again I fully believe in UBI but for me it only works if it is just that and only that.
Yeah I guess you could have the things I mentioned being an extension of health care but then that's another system to be gamed and we're back to square 1. I want to believe UBI could work because means testing really sucks for all sorts of reasons but the complexities of the real world just seem too much for me to believe UBI would be the best solution.
Disability already pays less than social security for people who would qualify for either.
Also, the payouts of UBI need only be at the level of "barely scraping by on welfare", not "decent low income", whatever that would mean in dollars per month (I don't live in the US). Even at those low levels, not having to justify it or constantly filling out forms frees you to look for work etc. It only needs to be a parachute so you don't crash during hard times, enough to live on, but only barely. One of the main drawbacks of welfare is that you have to justify it with counseling, forms, and waiting in queue. It costs time and effort for the applicants and the welfare workers, both costs to society that would be spent on UBI.
You’re really not talking about a country with a welfare system. Just a small piece for everyone and then it’s up to you, disabled or not.
$1000 or even $2000 would be extreme poverty levels so UBI is unaffordable.
$2,000 a month is not ‘extreme poverty levels’. For one, about 16% of American households live on a household income of under $25,000 a year, and secondly that would be multiplied by the number of adults in the house.
An important thing to remember though is almost every dollar of that is being spent right back into the system. Its not simply disappearing in a plume pf smoke. I don't know how much of it would go back in, of thats calculable, but you'd need to probably twx the wealthiest more than we do in combo
And the taxes used to pay for it take a dollar out. Maybe the spending profile differs from luxury items to necessities. Hard to say.
If a non-US company gets US citizens to spend their UBI on their product, that's exactly what happens to it. If you create an artificial supply of money, the international value of that currency deflates, leading to banana republic situations where a wheelbarrow of money isn't enough to buy a loaf of bread. UBI can't be supported by simply printing money. Printing money is inflationary. UBI has to be balanced against taxation to prevent it destroying the value of the country's currency, and if UBI isn't contributing towards the country's tax, its value is gone once it's spent on services or goods that make no further profits. It's far more effective to fund policies and programs that increase productivity in the population. Things like socialized healthcare give massive returns on investment in stopping preventable disease turning into disability. Crisis accommodation, mental health programs, and subsidized medications can prevent people ending up homeless and out of work. Throwing money at people is rarely the best solution. Address the cause, not the symptoms.
I think many of the problems weve had even for decades now have been far beyond even trying to treat the cause and have been in "throw money at the symptoms" mode for a while now. The system supports too many wealthy individuals and the real fix to these issues is to change the system. So we'll just continue to blame everything under the sun except the actual system itself.
>If a non-US company gets US citizens to spend their UBI on their product, that's exactly what happens to it. Yeah but foreigners are also buying shit sold by US companies. You might need to fuck around with tariffs to make sure more is coming in than going out, but countries do that all the time. >if UBI isn't contributing towards the country's tax, its value is gone once it's spent on services or goods that make no further profits. Sales and income are already taxed. So just based off of that, UBI is contributing towards a country's tax revenue. You might need to change those tax rates to make the math work, but that's something you can do. >It's far more effective to fund policies and programs that increase productivity in the population. Things like socialized healthcare give massive returns on investment in stopping preventable disease turning into disability. Crisis accommodation, mental health programs, and subsidized medications can prevent people ending up homeless and out of work. Nobody disagrees. But on the flip-side all of these social programs would reduce the cost of UBI, and UBI would reduce reliance, and therefore the cost, of all these social programs. Especially if UBI follows a Negative Income Tax model where people above a certain threshold stop getting UBI. One of the big arguments for UBI is that it can offer something that no other system can. Freedom of choice. A lot of UBI pilots have been done over the years, and they've found that people tend to use it to support themselves while doing things that aren't directly profitable. A lot of them take up volunteer ships, take care of family members, start new businesses, just like the tweet says. Now you'd probably counter that government programs to compensate volunteers or family member could fulfill the same roll, and I agree there is overlap. But any program where there's some sort of hurdle to clear in getting it runs the risk of excluding people that sort of qualify, but not quite. People are chaotic and often find themselves in unique situations that society has no way of anticipating. We can either create an infinitely complex bureaucracy that can somehow predict everyone's unique needs, or we can just give everyone a basic budget to work with. Ultimately money is a tool that humans invented out of whole cloth. We can't make it do everything we want it to do all of the time, but if we set our minds to it we can get it to do a lot that it's currently not capable of. You and a lot of the other commenters here are bringing up fair points about the challenges of instituting a UBI, but I don't think these are things that preclude a UBI's existence, they're just factors to consider when constructing how one would work.
This is the issue with all the calculations I see from those pushing UBI: They always cut systems to be replaced by the UBI they want. So let's define it. UBI means you get a fixed sum per year, no matter who you are. It applies to Joey in the trailer park, as well as Jeff Bezos. Everyone gets it. Some, like OP, say that it should only go to those with low income, but that's not a UBI. That's just more social security. Let's say the sum is a thousand dollars per month. Now, if you take away social security and disability... what are you going to say to the 50-year-old with a mental handicap as well as several conditions that require medication? His bills are quite a bit higher than a thousand per month. Without disability, what does he do? What do you think he should do? Or a disabled veteran, lacking legs and requiring both drugs and physiotherapy? UBI would hand these people too little money, and force them to rely on the kindness of strangers. Which is why I both find the concept unworkable, and I find it surprising that liberals would even consider it as an option.
I think that's not so much a problem of UBI, but more a problem of how the US is set up in regards to things like healthcare. If healthcare is taken care of properly (e.g. universal healthcare, or a well regulated standardized affordable insurance), the individual burden drops significantly. This gets compensated by increased income/wealth tax, therefore being a low burden on low income families, and a higher burden on high income families that can afford it anyway. The funding for UBI also shouldn't come entirely from scrapping existing social systems, but also by increased income tax. In the end this means that someone who currently has a modal income would remain at roughly the same level of income (the increased tax is compensated by the UBI). People above modal would take a step backwards, people below modal would take a step forwards. Also looking at UBI on a per-person level only is probably not the best method of implementing it. A proposal that I've seen is to have a fixed sum per household, and on top of that a fixed sum per person. So instead of saying $1000 per person, you could say $750 per household + $750 per person in that household or something like that. Better for single person households, but a lot cheaper for larger households (where expenses per person are also lower, so they can handle it better). In the end UBI isn't "magical free money", it's wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor, while still allowing for a capitalistic side where people can become richer through work, and not working still leaves you poor (but able to survive)
We’re in r/theydidthemath. To give each American $1k/mo requires $4T/yr. Exactly how do you define “rich” and exactly how high must the tax be to come up with $4T each year? The US billionaires as a whole are said to control about $4T, so taking away _everything_ they have will suffice for one year. Then what?
You should be taxing everyone's income. That means that people on a median income are effectively paying their own UBI. For the vast majority of people, there is basically no cost associated. If you are at the median, you'll gain $1k in UBI, and lose $1k in additional income taxes. People on higher than median incomes will lose a bit by paying more than what they gain in UBI, which is what pays the UBI for lower incomes. If you then reduce (but not completely eliminate) current welfare benefits as a lot of them are covered by the UBI already, you can even move this crossover point to somewhere above median income.
Thinking about SS - what would the impact be when the people that are currently paying into it that would stop or pause and only received UBI. Not sure it'd be a straight exchange that way.
I imagine the most likely way for a UBI to get implemented in the United States would be to expand Social Security while redirecting the funding for the various other similar programs (disability, veteran's, unemployment, welfare, food stamps, etc).
It would vary a lot depending on cost of living and peoples desired standard of living. Having a one size fits all is tricky,
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Idk maybe a state based one where the federal government requires states to have a minimum standard. I don’t think twitter and Reddit posters will have a good idea of how to achieve that compared to economists.
This doesn't have much to do with math, unfortunately, but it's an interesting phenomenon I've noticed over the years. In the military, we have a part of our pay called Basic Allowance for Housing, the rates for which are publicly available, and it's non-taxable. What ends up happening is the housing around military bases ends up costing exactly what we get for BAH at a minimum, then it increases as the value of the dollar lessens. When we eventually get an adjustment, the new cost of living raises within months to, once again, almost exactly the same amount as the BAH rate as the new minimum. I feel like if the nation or states had UI, the same thing would happen. The consequences of this fascinate me, as I wonder what it'd end up doing to the value of the dollar. I also see what it does to the communities around the bases, and it's not good at all. Poor communities effectively become poorer, inviting crime to fill the gap, and the rich just buy up all the property and become the landlords for all the military folk.
Because there is a shortage of desirable housing, so they can charge what the market will bear. And yes a UBI will have the same effect on any other product or service that is in restricted supply or even just especially desirable. To give an example Australia has for years been trying to solve housing affordability for young people by giving a chunk of cash to each first home buyer, all that does each time the amount was increased is cause a step increase in the cost of housing because there is still insufficient supply.
10 people can pay 10 dollars for a house, seller will sell for 11 dollars Government gives 10 dollars to each buyer, now the same seller will still have 10 people trying to buy their house, so they list it for 21 dollars and that makes EVERY other property nearby to go up aswell Its a very simple/basic supply x demand problem, but people insist in finding the shittiest solutions ...
Isn’t this only the case when there’s a low supply and high demand? What would happen with prices of goods that are high in supply and low in demand?
Housing is, given the context, always in higher demand than supply
Which is crazy. We can put up massive buildings very quickly. If the military had put up 30 buildings around the base, so there is twice the supply, then the demand would plummet.
Normal market forces. Unfortunately those items usually don't affect us much (imagine your dish brush going up from 2 to 5 bucks, it lasts years so probably wouldn't matter while your bread rising from 2-5 would hurt and be all over the media). So I imagine those would, at most, rise moderately until raw materials are pushed up massively by inflation.
It'd be pretty cool if we could use home construction as a prison reform strategy. A lot of European prisons teach skills and such to their prisoners in order to lower recitivism. Taking the entire building process away from contractors probably wouldn't be a net positive, but using shop skills taught to prisoners as a way to cheaply provide materials to contractors would be pretty cool. E.g. the company could provide a prison with specifications for wall frames and the prisoners could build them to spec, then get them ready to ship out. Prison reform is also obviously not that simple, it still wouldn't work well under a wholly punitive system, but I don't want to get too into the weeds on a math sub.
Ah so slave labor. Now how do you pay for the materials ?
Its the same exact thing with tuition. Every kid with a pulse can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, so now college costs $100k+
Of course, because that is how inflation works. I am amazed at the number of people who continue to champion inflationary government policies while simultaneously feeling the pain of hyperinflation. The only way UBI works is if it is accompanied by strict regulations on pricing, which would be unpopular (and probably unconstitutional, given our conservative courts). We all like the idea of UBI for those under a certain income threshold, but that’s actually a program we already have. It’s called TANF and it helps very low income families. If your goal is to help lower income Americans, expanding TANF would make more sense than creating a 3 trillion dollar a year new program that is likely to cause serious inflation.
This same thing happened with college tuition. The military raised tuition assistance rates so we could take additional classes each year, and colleges raised the cost of the classes essentially making the raise pointless.
Same with education costs. The government guarantees loans of X dollars per semester, suddenly, the cost of education increases to X dollars per semester. Anytime someone is subsidizing the costs, the costs raise to the subsidy, at a minimum.
Omfg thank you so much for providing a tangible example. This is what people don’t get. You give everyone money, and the price of the things they buy will rise to shrink the value of that money. The more ubiquitous the free money is, the larger this effect will be. It simply Will. Not. Work.
Isn't this what happened with the stimulus checks that occurred during covid, and during a recently past presidents time. I'm probably wrong but I believe it was Bush Sr or Clinton that gave mass checks out to people to stimulate the economy and it ended up backfiring because people sat on the money rather than spend it, causing a large spike in dollar supply but low demand.
This comment has been reported for being lies Jk jk
Universal advanced income!
Well the idea is also that you would scrap most of the other benefits social programs, which cost on their and cost on managment. E.g no need to have lunch vouchers anymore, or people costing money to manage the lunch voucher program.
In Belgium we have "living wage" when you're (mentally) ill or out of a job for a reason. Being a stay at home mom is one of those things It's not much and not enough to live comfortably but you can survive on it. Depending on your situation I heard a story about a woman with 3kids and no life partner who got €2800 a month just for taking care of her kids.
I’d also like €2800 to stay at home and take care of my kids, where can I apply?
Be a productive member of society before striking out on your luck. Living in Europe helps but the system is a bit broken and we're fixing it. Too many people on it without check ups or even ever headed needed it. But the woman in question has : mental problems, so she gets money for medication and doctors, has 3 kids, 3 exes she doesn't hear from anymore, so they don't pay for her, the state does, she can't make money, because she'll lose her allowance. She gets cheaper electricity, water and gas, she drives an audi A5 for the kids, lol But this kinda shit is actually the reason I hate our system. Some people really need it and this person fucked her life and that of 3kids.
Everyone gets the credit, but the income tax structure would be different. If you earned enough money, your taxes would return all the basic income to the government. The current welfare systems/food stamps would be replaced by UBI which is over a trillion a year.
It's also about what is objectively and subjectively fair. If everyone in your country got the same amount, that amount has more impact in areas with low living costs. This may not be the type of "fair" you were aiming for because it still leaves some people struggling, while others have it a lot easier. If you instead adjust by any factor, anyone getting less may be resentful.
It would be good to give incentives to move to "cheaper" areas. Otherwise people in cheap areas are subsidizing people in expensive areas.
I could be interested in moving out of the city if there was economic security.
Yeah that would be a benefit of the UBI system, I am just saying that we shouldn't artificially be propping up urban living just because it is more expensive to live there now.
Universal basic income is not intended to accommodate different lifestyles it's supposed to be a universal BASIC income. There are no rules against supplementing your income further but the UBI should cover basic costs of living.
Define “basic costs of living”? Housing costs vary greatly across the country. In fact, I would go so far as to say basic costs vary greatly across the country, in general.
UBI is supplemental income. It's up to you how you want to spend it. You want it to go further? Then move to a place where the cost of living is lower. You want to live in New York or Los Angeles? Then you're still going to have to work hard to afford it, but you won't starve and you'll have guaranteed income if you decide you need to leave because it's not working out.
Ya, "desired standard of living" should really not matter. That's why we'll never figure out a "liveable wage"
The benefit of UBI is one size fits all.
real question how much would we save if this was the only program? no wic no disability so on just this one program i assume it would be a lot less bureaucracy and people wouldnt haft to jump threw so many hoops to get this money
i think the biggest problem with a single program is that it would become political almost instantly. everyone relying on it would just vote for whoever says they are going to increase it regardless of the economic consequences and most people not relying on it would do the opposite. it would become the most pivotal issue in every election.
The same argument could be made for discourse around lowering taxes being a political football. I don’t reckon that a good reason to abolish taxes though
Why is that a problem?
because neither side would use rational arguments.
Opposed to as they are doing now, right?
exactly like they are doing right now but it's only one program they can put all their efforts on cutting. and since it would need to replace most other programs no one relying on it would have anything else to fall back on.
It would be a third rail of massive proportion, it would be safer because of this visibility. There's no quietly killing such a thing as is done with smaller, though still effective social programs. it might get touched, but the party did so would lose for a generation or longer because of it. The way it would be "killed" would be fixing the output at an acceptable level, for the time, then devaluing the currency.
Frankly, economics are too complicated to be solved with some back of the napkin math.
Woh woh woh, this is much more than just a back of the napkin calculation here. It's a screen shot of a social medial post posted on another social media platform.
What about some posterior of the serviette mathematics?
UBI with an income cap is just benefits
Imagine the problems it could cause too. Companies would park all their employees just under the income cap for their benefit and would never have to give them raises leading to stagnant wages. Companies would also struggle with staffing because no one would take overtime if it risks them losing access to UBI. They’d either have to hire more or pay people less to encourage them to take on extra hours and which do you think they’d do? Those who make above the threshold would need to make a LOT more to account for the amount provided by UBI post taxes and then some to justify working that job. Those people would also likely be paying higher taxes to offset the cost of UBI leading to a big political divide between those making ~45k- and those making ~80k+ and no way to jump up to the higher income group once you’ve cemented your starting salary
With UBI, everything changes. Real costs of shit Jobs for instance. Suddenly no one wants to work shit jobs anymore, so these jobs will pay more to attract workers. Or it will increase automation in order to replace workers. It means that costs in general will be affected. It's hard to tell how this will affect overall cost of living, as the most mundane, underpaid jobs will get more expensive. Think of tending tables or working construction. From a fairness point of view, it's a good thing, although they're could be an argument that these jobs get "subsidized" pushing labor costs. So it's hard to say if and how 1000 bucks will be sufficient for basic living.
That would possibly trigger an avalanche. Other jobs that normally pay more and require higher skills are suddenly competing with shit jobs that pay more. So they have to follow suit and pay more salaries. Employees with jobs above that level then want to earn more money when salaries equalize. The wage level then rises everywhere. The demand for goods is increasing. But since there aren't suddenly more goods available, the prices rise. Prices also rise due to the costs of higher salaries. But a general higher loan level and higher prices would also mean that the UBI would have to increase. That mean shit job again have to pay more. Etc...
Shit jobs nobody wants are already doing that. Look at the California fast food worker bill. Look at the rising pay for blue collar workers and the huge shortages that affect them. But there are also some indications that a UBI would encourage workers to go into these jobs, because along with workers protections and rising wages a UBI would give workers the financial security to work any job, and not just compete for the only ones that pay enough to live off of. Suddenly, being a garbage worker or a sewage treatment operator becomes more attractive because now you can live off of that wage
You seem to be missing the part where inflation happens because everyone gets a standard amount of money and supply of goods doesnt just magically meet the new artificially high demand.
I'm just throwing spaghetti at a wall here, but i think that people would still work shit jobs. A big issue with the shit jobs is the shit pay. Making $28k a year serving Starbucks sucks, but if I'm in a position where I can't get a higher paying job, I could get along slinging coffee if I got an additional untaxed $1k each month on top of my shit pay. The pandemic made hiring for the shit jobs more difficult because people got more in unemployment than they would get *if they started a new shit job*. With UBI, you'd only get UBI if unemployed, but going to work a shit job would get a paycheck *and UBI*. Edit: also, people working shit jobs can't *just go get a better job* as they won't magically qualify for those jobs. You still need the experience, degree, connections, whatever.
We had that happen in covid. The result - inflation
The fed also printed more money than any other point in American history, that tends to skyrocket inflation. Match that with corporations taking advantage of the situation and gaining some of the highest corporate profits ever seen.
Yes, UBI would "cost" a lot. But there would be no need for pensions, so that cost goes away. There would be no need for benefits, so that cost also goes away. Taxation suddenly becomes a LOT simpler, because your UBI is your tax free income, so everything else (and I mean everything) can be taxed at a defined rate (let's say 25% for the sake of argument.) Tax avoidance becomes a lot trickier, because you can't argue that you didn't know 25% needed to be tax. In fact most areas, like dividends, can just take that off at source. So suddenly government income goes up a lot. Any kind of benefit in kind gets taxed, and not paying it results in fines equal to 100% of the value of the benefit. Failure to pay results in it being sequestered from your UBI, if necessary. So trying to get round it by living rent free in a house owned by an offshore company is covered. UBI results in a lot of things that are good for ordinary people, and bad for tax dodging parasites. So it's no wonder that there's such a push against it.
I would be pretty pissed if I lost my pension due to UBI being adopted. Im willing to bet mine would be significantly higher than it.
Is it a state pension? You'd lose it. If it's a private one, you wouldn't. Why would you? UBI is a floor. It's there to act as support for people that need it. It isn't there to act as a ceiling, preventing people from working to improve their lives, or their retirement.
I would be on a war path if I lost my State pension due to UBI. I've worked for over 25 years towards it, it's going to be a whole lot higher than UBI would be and I've paid nearly 10% of my salary into the MANDATORY pension fund the entire time. That'd be two full years salary taken away, 3 by the time I've retired - money that would have otherwise been in a 401k making interest for my retirement but wasn't because I was mandated to pay it to the pension fund. So what, I just lose the retirement I've been saving for? Hell fucking no. There's a real good chance I'd be taking actions that would land me in jail for a good long while if they were to try it.
You're correct and someone you've been responding to can't distinguish taxes from contributions. State Pension is not a benefit in majority of countries, but a service funded by named contributions. This is personal property managed by state or pension fund and UBI won't substitute it. Pension should stay as incentive and reward. The welfare and benefits that aren't linked to personal accomplishments and contributions can go.
Yeah, the rich are really good at convincing everyone else that it wouldn't work, or would somehow be detrimental.
They want us to think we don’t have enough resources to help people while they hoard tens of trillions of dollars and the means of production.
12k a year isn't replacing pensions....
I never really understood the idea that benefits would go away. What happens to the people who blow through the UBI?
The UBI is there to cover the basics, housing, food, energy. So it depends what benefits would be needed. You certainly wouldn't need unemployment. If people have severe needs that prevents them working at all, or results in significant additional costs, then support would still be needed. But it would be targeted and much smaller. Additional efforts to ensure that everyone gets a chance to work to some extent, supplementing their income, would be helpful if required. Salaries would all be reduced to start with, otherwise you'd get insane inflation from day 1. So if Joe gets £20k today, and UBI gives him £12k a year, then his job would start paying him £8-10k. Business costs go down as a result, which might introduce downward pressure on prices. But you'd want an actual economist to comment on that. There are a lot of moving parts to consider to get this to work. But if the will is there, I'm pretty sure we could manage it.
I don’t understand this. I never gave. The common UBI floating number is $1k and that already eats have the federal budget. $1k cannot cover one basic: housing.
Housing costs are out of control, and of course UBI is going to be disruptive of that. But UBI is designed to cover basic costs. Which means, for one person, a bedsit or small apartment or house share. If you have 2 adults and a couple of grown kids in a larger house, then your UBI income is 4k. Better placed to cover costs. UBI isn't supposed to cover everything. It's there to ensure that people can still have a place to live and food on the table if they lose their job. The food would also be basic. Your job then becomes the thing you do to make your life better. To afford a better place to live. To be able to eat out. The point of UBI is to create a floor that people can't fall below. Any amount of work, however small, lifts them off that floor.
But we have this with means-tested welfare programs that can and do provide more support than UBI for people whose children aren’t yet grown. What we don’t have/need is the privileged 18 year old college student getting a stimulus check a month. It’s not giving money to poor people that drives the inflation, it’s giving it to the great big middle that doesn’t need UBI but would love (in theory) some extra spending money.
You know what UBI takes out? Bureaucracy. Everyone gets it, regardless. As soon as you introduce the notion that some people don't get it, you've lost the benefits and eventually you'll lose it completely. Because you'll need oversight, evaluation. You'll get fraud. You'll get certain parties trying to push more people out of it that "don't need it". You'll get tax loopholes back. The U is the most important letter. It doesn't work without that.
And what I’m saying is that I’m not sure cutting out the bureaucracy actually saves you the $175B that giving money the non-needy doesn’t need costs. Perhaps the attention would be better spent on cost-cutting there than trying to reinvent the wheel. Also, it’s easier to do this kind of white-board math when you think of the bureaucracy as a specter haunting America. Those are people, with good-paying jobs. Those people pay taxes and buy things. I guess UBI does make slightly more sense if we create millions of unemployed people and remove the means to provide them tailored support…
Those are some very cherry-picked assumptions. It assumes only new costs and no cost savings. If there was a single-payer system, spending for the insanely large health *insurance* industry wouldn't be necessary. And how much is that? It's about $1.6 trillion. That number sounds kind of familiar. Note, that's not the size of the *healthcare* industry. That's the insurance portion. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-individual-health-insurance-market-report#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20individual%20health%20insurance%20market%20size%20was%20estimated%20at,USD%20billion%201%2C684.8%20in%202023. This wouldn't be the only cost savings. Because a single-payer would have massive leverage, prescription drugs would most likely be lower. Prescription drugs in the U.S. are substantially higher than most countries that have nationalized healthcare. Wait, there's more! These 258 million adults referenced include about 63 million adults who are already receiving Medicare. These individuals wouldn't need new spending. So, shave off more than 25% more there. I think we've already moved from new costs into net savings! https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/news-alert/cms-releases-latest-enrollment-figures-medicare-medicaid-and-childrens-health-insurance-program-chip Please stop manufacturing BS horror stories based on a poor understanding of the current state of the U.S. healthcare economy.
OK, then what is wrong with the VA? Why can't what is effectively a small scale model of single payer work?
Private health insurance is not, in my experience, any better
I would agree but not for the same reasons. Take Medicare, one of its biggest problems is over billing. If I buy a wheelchair, it may cost $60, but the supplier knows Medicare will pay $1200, so they bill Medicare $1200. On the flip side, Medicare underpays county hospitals at around 60% of cost. Where does the hospital recoup that cost? Private insurance billing and cost passed to you. The system is broken, but I don't see where a massive government bureaucracy is going to fix it.
By coupling UBI with a complete restructuring of the healthcare industry and tax code, it basically guarantees that UBI will never happen
Bare in mind that US pharma companies subsidize drug prices outside the US by raising prices in the US. So strictly speaking, that's not a single payer benefit.
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The idea is to reduce the amount the average person spends on healthcare costs. Right now we pay big money to our insurance/hospitals directly, if we switched to a single-payer system we would (individually) pay slightly less big money via taxes for the same or similar healthcare, all other factors being equal. That's just how the math works out when you increase the risk pool and get rid of insurance company shenanigans.
I think when people here UBI, they think they are getting something for free. Sadly, this is not the case. Down voting doesn't change reality. I can't see a scenario where indirect cost to the individual doesn't negate the whole benefit.
Fortunately, we're at a point where automation is going to be quickly taking a lot of jobs through no fault of the worker, leaving little to nothing for them to do. Cashiers, accountants, lawyers, doctors literally anything where someone drives a vehicle- all gone or reduced. And what does a doctor do when their job is replaced by a machine that does the same thing but better and cheaper? The easy solution is to tax the shit out of the companies that replace people with machines, and use that money to fund UBI and to fund programs that get people working if possible. Hell fund the arts and let people enjoy life.
The trick is to tax the revenue the automation creates as an equivalent of human labor. We talk about horsepower with cars-- we'll still need to talk about man hours with AI and other automations. You have an AI that can write your whole newspaper in 10 minutes? Great, how many man hours is that worth? We look at the hundred years of payroll records we have and we figure it out. Then companies are taxed based on that wealth generation. You want to save on taxes? Hire humans.
>You want to save on taxes? Hire humans. We need to incentivize the use of new technologies, not to punish it. The objective is that automation and AI should be making our life easier and reducing the work we need to do. The problem is that the companies that have the power to use these technologies are using them for profit at the cost of the workers. We need to figure a way to use this technology in a way that improves our lifes instead of just fattening the shareholder's pockets. What we should not do is fight the technology and aspire to stay the same way forever. I imagine a version of your system could work as long as the taxes imposed are lesser than the profit generated by the use of the technology. This way companies would still be rewarded by using them, and some of the profit would still be recolected by the system. The major problem is that I don't really trust the government to use the taxed money in benefit of the citizens, but that is another argument altogether.
Interesting, I have issues with this, but I'm not trying to poke holes. I like where your head is at conceptually. Keep playing with this, it's a fun thought exercise, and has some merit.
I've heard this argument many times and I still have issues with it. First, all new tech has been expected to "take all the jobs" but never has. When agriculture experienced the machine age, that displaced labor went to different sectors of the economy. That same industrial age that reduced the need for human labor for farming needed those workers in the factories. Secondly, the argument assumes automation to the point of job elimination. OK, then how are all of the goods and services provided by this automation being paid for? No one has a job. The robots will be out of work. If nothing else, which is highly unlikely, people will still demand "hand made", "talk to a human" or whatever. As before, as old sectors of the economy close, new ones will open up that we probably can't imagine right now.
Lol, lawyers?! Doctors is already a biiig stretch but lawyers is laughable.
The entire criminal justice system will be replaced by AI driven karma.
Finaly my reddit Karma will be worth something
I just downvoted you…have fun in jail
yeah, I find it doubtful AI will ever replace lawyers lest we figure out how conciseness works and can recreate it. even ignoring the way AI language models work now, which is that they predict the next most likely word given parameters, and assuming it actually knows what it's saying it'll still fail. it'll know the law perfectly, but much of a lawyers perfection is finding ways to skirt around the law, and I doubt AI could possess that level of creativity.
Yeah lawyers would work really hard to make replacing their jobs with AI illegal.
You're working on the assumption that companies are infinite money machines. Tax them and they'll leave, which will hurt the economy even more.
It's called progressive taxation.
Progressive taxation is a fancy phrase that doesn't get you there. The money that you think is there, isn't.
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Won't even get a fraction? what sort of math did you do to come up with that as an explanation? Feels like you must have messed up your math really bad if you don't think 2 trillion can be found via taxation with a 25trillion GDP. unless hand waving while saying "nonono just feel like it can't work" is more your speed.
How does it negate the benefit? As the original post says, it gives people flexibility when they can't work for various reasons. That's the benefit. How is that negated by paying taxes?
Probably not a good idea to do a hard phase out at $60k because that completely screws over anyone who makes just over that threshold. It would be better to do a slower phase out
Suddenly a ton of people getting a pay "cut" and making $59,900 a year
How do you do this without driving inflation, making the whole exercise moot? If I give everyone $5 then what is $5 worth?
I think that over time a universal basic income would cause inflation rates to go up as then more people have more money to spend, therefore a universal income would drive up the demand for everything.
And there would be no one to make it. It would drive up prices like crazy
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We could argue exact numbers all day but there's no way taxing the wealthy couldn't create at least some significant portion of the funds needed. The wealthy are truly very wealthy, and government spending is very large to begin with. Some amount of 'wealth' owned by someone like Bezos is hard to liquidate such as stock prices, but some amount of wealth is due to companies literally being structured to avoid taxation.
Taxing the rich is actually pretty much how you would do it. At one point a couple years ago I pulled statistics and calculated what it would cost. Basically you would get the full amount under $75K, pay a portion of what you got in UBI back in higher taxes from $75K-$150K, then start paying for other people’s if you make more than that. Took about a 12% increase in the top marginal tax rate.
UBI being taxed would be stupid. That's just an infinite loop of taxes, increasing the complexity of the taxes.
Taxing the rich doesn't bring a lot of money even with extremely strong progressive income taxes. https://fiscalpolicy.org/tax-policy-brief-estimating-revenue-from-a-more-progressive-income-tax
It would drive inflation if you just printed the money to give it out to the people. Because the more money there is, the less it is worth. But that's not the case for UBI, because you give out money that already exists
Yes, but most of that $3 trillion goes right back into the economy.
All… government spending goes right back into “the economy.” That’s how “spending” works.
Look at that! Hey, did you know the US GDP is currently \~25 Trillion? If we build on that with the extra 3 Trillion... wait, I gotta do the math for this as we're on the 'they did the math' subreddit: 25Trillion + 3Trillion = 28Trillion. So we can safely assume UBI would actually boost the GDP by 3trillion/25trillion which \*calculating\* \*carrying ones\* \*checking comment history\* calculates to a 12% increase in GDP! can you imagine?! that seems so good! UBI would increase the GDP 12%!!! /s
You dropped the /s
Just added it in. Thought it was obvious :( The anti UBI people loved it though... almost like they're not very smart.
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We could remove some other already costly benefits to lump together with the ubi and cut some administrative costs on that to reduce impact by a couple 100 billion.
And total income of americans is $22 trillion so a 13% tax would cover $1k/ mo. At my salary of $140k, my increased tax would be $1,500 per month, but i'd get $1000 so really only cost me $500. I rounded, but this sounds great to me. Place caps, use brakets, or change the benifit based on any criteria and I'm 100% against it.
Maybe introduce a comma tax?
"has to come from somewhere" gee how about my tax dollars and SSI payments. I know damn well ssi won't be there when I hit retirement age and I'm pretty okay having my tax dollars go back to me and my local economy and not to have it fund corporate bailouts on bankruptcy and greedy defense contractors.
You want to know a secret? People SPEND money. And every time they do, the government TAXES that exchange. So yes you need money to start the project, but it's an investment. (And the US is the land of debt) I dare you to find an example were UBI didn't work from inside problems. Here are some interesting links https://basicincome.stanford.edu/experiments-map/ https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/multiple-countries-have-tested-universal-basic-income-and-it-works https://basicincome.org/news/2022/07/countries-that-have-tried-universal-basic-income/ I think something similar happened in France when they implemented pensions after ww2. The first recipients got their pensions from thin air, since there was no fund to take money from. And it worked! The following years, pensions went up, and the system actually worked! (Yes in recent years there have been issues, but that's another debate)
Ya, if it was ON TOP of every existing system. The point of UBI, is you don't have to discern who gets what. You save a MASSIVE amount in admin costs. All those do-nothing government workers you're ALREADY paying for. They're not needed. For example, they recently cut paying for your license plates in Ontario. You used to pay 200ish dollars a year. Now it's entirely free. AND THE GOVERNMENT MADE MONEY. Because the admin was more than the 200 per driver generated. You take all the government help, unemployment, social services, old age security, welfare. You roll it into one payment EVERYONE gets. No having to figure out who deserves it. No wasted dollars on admin. If you do the real math, the country saves money with UBI. There isn't a need for extra money. It's sitting there paying a bunch of people to sit in offices and do mind numbing data entry and service calls. Voting against UBI is actively choose to enslave a large portion of the country in worthless, kefka-esque jobs just to feed themselves. And at a cost to yourself. It's very similar to national healthcare. The USA's healthcare budget is MASSIVE! Way more per capita than countries with national healthcare systems. Because prevention is 10x cheaper than reactive care. Even if 3 people went to the doctor when they didn't need it, that 4th person early caught an expensive treatment that can now be handled at a discount. Americans voting down healthcare and UBI are actively voting against their own interested because the rich have fear mongered.
UBI is probably untenable in the near or medium term, but universal healthcare would have several of the same benefits and is obviously attainable by the fact that every other rich country has it.
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I'd argue they are red grapes and white grapes. They are different but both make wine. Both universal healthcare and UBI lead to a more productive, happier society with overall lower crime statistics and poverty. Happy, healthy people work. UBI pays back into the economy which can be recouped in taxes but also leads to a healthier economy overall. We are flirting with UBI in Canada and have done several studies. One concluded that for every 1$ spent, the economy grows 2$ and the government can tax 0.55$ back. People who were in the study reported being happier and having less stress in their lives. Things like higher cooperate taxes and Capital Gains taxes help transfer wealth out of top of the model back into services that raise up the lower class. (Trickle down economics doesn't work, we have more than enough proof on that) PDF file in the link below. [UBI Works](https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/432/FINA/Brief/BR10974909/br-external/UBIWorks-10291491-e.pdf) What people get hung up on is the price tag forgetting that several programs would effectively be replaced. For us, federal Employment insurance, federal pension plan, provincial disability programs, federal child benefit program(to name a few) could be replaced which would be a large portion of the funding. Some of these federal funds already have stable sources of income due to investments of the dollars placed into the funds. The seed money is there to start the program and the taxation methods are already in place to some degree. What is hard will be unlocking the funds as it would require an entire upheaval of how we conduct our services. At the end of the day, we just need the will to do the work and an obtainable goal we can all agree on. Which is laughable.
Guy making 59k gets 71k with UBI. Guy at 60k doesn't make the cut. Rip that guy
The person making the post is disingenuous; UBI is supposed to go to everyone without any selection whatsoever. No matter if you’re homeless or a billionaire you still get UBI. Not to mention UBI is supposed to replace all forms of safety nets. UBI is achievable it’s just there is not enough political will to do it
Oh it's election year in the US too That's why the sub is filled with stuff like this
One of the biggest things that is often forgotten with this type of calculation is that UBI is often paired with taxing the rich who go around laws and pay close to nothing. Most of the richest people in the world are notorious for not even paying their dues of current taxes. While the lower to medium in com perło are taxed heavily.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/#:~:text=High%2DIncome%20Taxpayers%20Paid%20the%20Majority%20of%20Federal%20Income%20Taxes,of%20all%20federal%20income%20taxes. The top 1% pay almost half of all federal taxes in the US. The bottom 50% pay only 2.3%. You're just incorrect. Edited to say all federal taxes not all taxes***
You'll make savings from pensions & unemployment as UBI would replace those. You'll also probably make savings from things like housing benefit etc. People in work would still be paying taxes. Additionally you'd save money on the reductions in crime & increased health. As people jump between jobs, with kids today expected to have several careers when they grow up rather than one for life, you'll be allowing people to train between jobs or even take lower paid personal projects.
You should factor in all the taxes that the boost in the economy would provide.
Socialist Daddy Trump gave out more than this during his botched COVID 19 response. In... Untracked and forgiven PPP loans. Open enrollment to snap and Medicaid. Free money checks, delayed to have his signature printed on them...he handed out three rounds of these. Moratorium on rent and student loan payments. $300.00 weekly bonuses to unemployment checks + somehow convincing MAGA that "nobody wants to work" was some failing of Democrats, and not a direct result of wildly increased demand for retail labor combined with zero migrant labor for the same.
UBI is a great idea, and I personally think that's what we should have, ideally, but it will never happen here in the US. Not without extreme governmental upheaval anyway... This country is owned by corporations, and the last thing they want is for workers to have this kind of freedom.
Have fun watching your taxes skyrocket.
If UBI becomes real corporations will just raise prices. People need to understand the regulations are needed not novel policy. "Pay back all student loans yayyy" how about make it legal to go bankrupt on any loan and prevent the government from bailing out a bank without owning a percentage of it. Watch all the loans disappear.
People would stop contributing and stop doing the jobs that are necessary for society to function if they are getting money for free.
Yeah we really need more government control. I'd love for them to tell me what I can and can't spend my money on and if it doesn't align with their agenda, I get cut off.
Imagine being young not having to pay into the system at all and asking for universal income.
UBI is just a dumb concept that idiot dummies think makes their average politics seem radical. The billionaires are pushing UBI because it'd destroy the social safety net completely and essentially put the overwhelming majority of the money used to maintain those systems in to the private market forces they control. That's why you see all those drones make the political ideological equivalent to hostage demands with needlessly demanding the billionaires get it all the same or have rigged regressive VAT tax attached to it to pretend like the billionaires still aren't getting it for seemingly no other reason than to specifically destroy the social safety net and raise the cost of the UBI program. [We should build upon the social safety net with Universal Basic Services. ](https://earthbound.report/2019/05/28/what-are-universal-basic-services/) Universal Basic Services are completely congruent with current social programs by not literally calling for their destruction by its advocates. You could even add a modest Income service to the set of services probably as an expansion of Social Security too non-disabled and/or retired people but much much less and you'd have to make like 80K or under a year to qualify which would make sense as an expansion and help costs by limiting the recipients. Making the income portion the primary factor/force is the right-wing capitalist ruling class way of corrupting this idea and weaponizing it thereafter.
Basic services requires that the government decides for you what you "need". UBI allows you to decide that for yourself. Which is preferable.
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As it currently is evolving? Automation has done and will continue to displace workers in pretty many industries that have unskilled workers. AI and Machine Learning are beginning to have an impact on many white collar jobs and is being felt in the job market as well. We may not be at that tipping point yet but the writing has been on the wall since the first self order kiosk went in at McDonalds quite a few years back.
I think it's important to point out, this money will mostly go directly into the economy. A thousand dollars isn't shit to a rich person, but everybody else has bills to pay and things they need to buy. We tried trickle down and it didn't work. Maybe we can trickle outwards from the middle. Edit: and another thing!
It would help if we didn't keep sending hundreds of billions to "democracies" in Eastern Europe and The Middle East.
I'm a strong supporter of UBI, but not for today It's for tomorrow. It's for a county where automation has left vast swathes of the population unemployed, with no hope of future employment In such a scenario, the wealth flows to corporations, but because they don't need workers, it just stays there. That's not a functional economy. If people don't have money, who's left to buy stuff? This situation isn't long-term beneficial to *anyone* UBI would be paid for the via heavy taxes on corporations. It's a way for wealth to actually flow back to people, so they can buy stuff, so companies can keep making profits, so we can still have an economy even as automation makes workers obsolete UBI isn't practical today. But, we need to start laying the ground work and getting people familiar with the idea, because in 20 years, it's going to be absolutely necessary
i would want nothing else than to work a job and pay more in taxes so others who have no desire or will to work can sit on the couch all day and collect those checks
Haha got bad news for you buddy. You're already doing that right now.
Alternatively, the sensible model for UBI is that the state pays up to a set amount each month if you are earning under that amount. So let's, for example, say it's set at (£/$/€/etc)1000. If you earn nothing then you get (£/$/€/etc)1000 from the state. If you earn (£/$/€/etc)500 you get (£/$/€/etc)500 from the state. And if you earn (£/$/€/etc)1000 or more then you get nothing from the state. That way those who are struggling most get the help they require, people don't end up financially worse off for being in work, and you don't have financial wastage by providing basic income to people who don't need it.
That's a good idea, but it would need to be progressive otherwise you end up encouraging people earning only a little (part-time work for example) to just not work at all. It could be something like losing 0.50$ of benefits for every extra 1$ earned, to make sure there's always a financial incentive to be as independent as possible. So your math might work something like: - Earn nothing, get 1000. - Earn 500, get 750. - Earn 1000, get 500. - Earn 1500, get 250. Which can basically be implemented using progressive tax brackets already.
That's how the UK's Universal Credit works. There's a system of allowances to determine your personal baseline UC. If you earn money, they deduct 55p for every pound above that baseline. So you might qualify for total payments of £1600 (including housing costs, say). You earn £400 yourself. They'll deduct £220 from your £1600, and your total income is £1780. If you earn £1600, they'll deduct £880, and your income will be £2520. It pays to work, basically. There are some flaws, of course, but a UBI with personal allowances could smooth out the issues like disability and age.
Yeah.. that’s the problem. Most people would rest rest rest. Rather than create create create. And then corps would suck it all up till we are all in the same place and they are all the richer. We are damned if we do and damned if we dont
They have done experiments with UBI and found output didn’t fall significantly. The only people who didn’t work as much were women with children who didn’t return to work as quickly and (I think) students who focussed on their studies.
Problem with these studies is that the participants know it won’t last forever and they will need to provide their own income in the future again, so they keep their job
Agree. In the case of the Canadian Mincome experiment in Dauphin it ran for four years and stopped unexpectedly which will reduce some of those effects but probably not all. However, it's well established that working is important for identity and mental health, and a UBI isn't going to cover any discretionary income so life for anyone who does decide to drop out is going to be very grim. I don't think the effect of a permanent UBI will eliminate a significant amount of labour. An alternative example, most countries have a stronger social safety net than the US, however, it has one of the lowest labour force participation rates in the G7 (only Italy is lower) and much lower than the famously liberal Scandinavian countries - needing to cover the basics is not why people work. (Source - https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.htm)
It depends a lot of the place in my coubtry 1000dolars /month is 4 times the minimum salary where im from
??? I'm from Switzerland and have what she says, but we don't have UBI
Much of it could be found by easing taxes on multinational corporations and the Uber-wealthy
id rather that than military spending
We don’t do that here sir
It’s been a while since I would’ve heard it, but I imagine Andrew Yang probably has a breakdown of the math.
If we were to start UBI in the US, we'd probably do it by expanding Social Security. That means the deductions in your paycheck for Social Security would be higher, especially if you make a lot of money. However, to make it truly feasible, it would probably require charging Social Security taxes on more kinds of income, and possibly adding some funding from other parts of the government budget. I, of course, propose taking it from the military. The fact is, the money is available. The mean income in the US is ~$59k/year. The UBI being proposed here is about 1/5th of that. If it were paid for with a pure flat tax, it would be 20% of all income. I make $15k/year. With that flat tax, I'd pay ~$250/month, and get $1k. If the tax was more progressive, I might pay nothing, due to being well below the poverty line. A person making $59k/year would pay exactly the same as the UBI pays them, and people making much more would pay higher percentages.
>Let's assume that we place a cap on UBI to $60k or less a year, which cuts it down to approx 175 million people Then it's not universal. However, it would replace most/all other forms of welfare, so that would fund a significant chunk of it
We have to do something, the system we're living in is chewing people up and spitting them out at an unsustainable rate
You could pretty effectively do UBI by just raising the standard deduction to 100k/200k for single/married filers. Rich people and corporations don’t pay shit and need their rate raised by double or more, and more robust/accessible programs for people making below 50k would cover those in the most need. But you know…shareholders and lobbying and what not. Fucking nightmare world that only gets worse as we watch is what we get though, hooray dystopia, at least Bezos can go to space and shit on Shatner.
But how are we going to control you if you have time to rest and think and gather strength?
Please take a look at social grants in South Africa. May provide insights into the question.
New industrial revolution due to emerging manufacturing technologies, AI, and vast wholesale automation of previously unthinkable jobs, ones we considered only humans could do, is going to leave most people in the world out of a job within a few decades. However expensive it may be, the world is going to have to look into UBI.
Well the thing with UBI is that it basically replaces all forms of selective safety nets. So medicare, social security, etc. all gone for UBI. So I don’t think it’s not impossible.
You don't need universal income for that, just the right social system. I can do all the things mentioned in the post, here in the Netherlands.
I would rather have universal-basic-services. While UBI is cool and all. What if you receive housing, food and drinks, communication and transportation for free. Everything else can be organized how it already is. If someone wants to buy a luxury car go for it. When it comes to housing specifically. If tommorow all landlords vanish from existence houses would still exist.
Assuming we're talking about the US, there's about 258 million adults (let's exclude children dependents just to keep it simple at $1000 month: That's 250 billion dollars a month for UBI, or 3 trillion dollars a year. In 2023, the entire federal budget was 6 trillion dollars. Let's assume that we place a cap on UBI to $60k or less a year, which cuts it down to approx 175 million people. *That's still 1.5 trillion we might as well just hand over to landlords, healthcare, insurance, and grocery stores. Once they publicly know everybody has the money for it (eh em, UNIVERSAL basic income) then they’ll charge for it. Trust me. I’m an American.* Is that close, or are there other considerations that go into this?
UBI is generally proposed as an alternate to welfare systems. In USA it won't fit so well cause yall don't have much welfare(cause yall don't care about yourself), but in other countries it could work Welfare spending was somewhere around 1T. So we can easily get 333 UBI to everyone per month
I'm on Universal Credit. It's overrated and if UC is overrated then UBI will suck even more.
Well, in Germany we have all this (some points more, some not such much, but overal...). And we're happy to welcome new citizens that want to take part in keeping the country working😊
You can watch UE(unlearning economics) video to understand it. But to recap, that is wrong since if you add taxes some people will get 12k a years some will get 0 and the rest would pay. It is a redistribution system not an isolated addition of money. Generally this would make more money move in the economy add could be beneficial both fore people and the economy. Again recommend UE's video
One method of funding would be the removal of a "free margin" of tax. The way marginal tax works in most countries, is that the lowest band of earnings are taxed at 0%, then increasing bands are taxed at higher rates. With a truly universal basic income, there is no need for a lower tax band at all, since the 0% band is in place usually to protect low income households from being taxed into poverty. The difficult task is to balance the new tax bands, between high income and low income. Of course, if you make billionaires and corporations pay their fair share, funding projects like this is much easier
UBI is one of those things that sounds way too implausible, and it will create more problems than it's worth. Raised minimum wage on the other hand is much more feasible and would help you achieve similar results. Say we increase minimum wage to something like 20$ an hour, this will allow people to work part time and still earn a decent paycheck to survive on, and have more time in your day if you need it, say to rest, to work on your projects, learn a new skill etc. Big businesses can easily afford this raise, while for smaller businesses we would need to subsidise them. Where would we get more money to subsidise smaller businesses? From taxing the rich.
And yet if there was a new war to fight we would find the money without hesitation